“Sex with yourself is, theoretically, the time when you can drop the moaning and the sexy faces and just enjoy yourself. New data suggests we’ve found a way to ruin that too. A 2026 Pleasure Census conducted by dating app HUD and sexual wellness brand Girls Get Off surveyed 2,183 people across 63 countries and found that 54% of Gen Z catch themselves ‘performing’ during solo sex — thinking about how they look, sound, or should feel, with no one even in the room. Across all age groups, the figure sits at 44%. The same survey found 73% of Gen Z say appearance concerns make sex harder to enjoy. There’s a clinical name for this…” | | You’ve been here before: staring at the spinning build indicator like it owes you an apology, copy-pasting Stack Overflow answers into a prayer. Visual Studio has been your weird, complicated work relationship for years. But VS Pro 2026 is different. Smarter tooling, faster debugging, and a UI that doesn’t feel like it was designed to test your patience. It’s a one-time purchase, yours to keep, and it might actually make you forget that debugging used to feel like a punishment. [Ad] | | “Change sprawls constantly across the storefronts on the postcard streets of downtown Ridgewood, New Jersey. The big avenue, East Ridgewood, cuts across streets called Walnut, Chestnut, and Oak, and then abuts the train station that connects this commuter suburb to New York City. It’s a town where anything is reachable within five to 10 minutes of driving, and its center is the proverbial Main Street. ‘Ridgewood has always been known as the place to go shopping,’ says Joan Groome, who has lived here since 1968, when she opened a ski shop above a family-run store selling gifts and art. Over the years, Groome watched a wave of big-box chains sweep through Ridgewood and then a wave of banks. Local retail like hers strived and survived or went under; doors have shut on a beloved stationery store, a family-owned pharmacy, a hardware shop. Now a new shift is reshaping this downtown, as it has many around the U.S.: Stores that sell things are giving way to shops that sell services — spas, gyms, restaurants.” | | “Thousands of years since the phrase ‘Know thyself’ was first inscribed on a temple in ancient Greece, we still have trouble following the instruction. One can seek out countless philosophy courses, yoga retreats and sweat-lodge-bound ayahuasca trips in the hopes of attaining self-knowledge. Therapy also comes highly recommended. But for those who prefer a quicker — and cheaper — road to enlightenment, facsimiles of spiritual awakening can be found in astrology, the Enneagram, the five love languages and the Myers-Briggs. Even, for a time, in BuzzFeed quizzes that revealed which ‘Parks and Recreation’ character you were based on how you built a pizza. The results of these self-assessments matter far less to the outside world than they do to the person taking them, which is to say, you’re unlikely to miss out on a job opportunity for being a Virgo. So why do we hew to them as forms of self-discovery?” | | There’s using AI, and there’s knowing AI, and the gap between the two is where careers either speed up or get left behind. This certificate program skips the surface-level stuff and goes straight into prompt engineering, agentic coding, and workflow automation, the kind of skills that separate someone who chats with a bot from someone who’s quietly automated half their job. Four courses, 100+ lectures, one very solvable knowledge gap. [Ad] | | “For four years, little red dots (LRDs) have been the hottest topic in astrophysics. Astronomers first noticed them in observations that NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) made in 2022. The LRDs weren’t exactly subtle — each is at least 100,000 times larger than our sun. And they exist in almost every swath of sky that JWST has surveyed as it peers at the universe’s first 1.5 billion years or so. Since their discovery, theorists have raced to explain what LRDs really are, how they came to be so ubiquitous, and why they’re mostly absent from the modern-day universe.” | |
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